Edgar De Witt Jones expressed his feeling after hearing Newton preach by saying, "This is the man, these are the lips that speak the most chaste and beautiful English in the Christian pulpit today."4

As a preacher Newton was a rare combination of the mystic, the teacher and the prophet. His pulpit utterance was marked by a quiet, earnest, easy delivery. Preaching was to him a never-ceasing source of joy.

In the first chapter of his autobiography, Newton confesses that the pulpit was his place of release from inner solitude and silence. "The pulpit is a public place, but its message has to do with the most intimate and inward affairs of the human heart -- things we seldom say to anyone or allow anyone to say to us, save in the most confidential friendship, or in hours of crisis and disaster when the soul is near the surface. Yet the awful public-privacy of the pulpit not only permits, but invites, the opening of heart to heart, and one may speak to a thousand people words which one would hardly speak to a friend. Such is the wonder of preaching; it is unlike any other speech known among men."5

In 1917, Newton was invited to give the Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale, but his war-time ministry in London prevented his acceptance of the invitation. In 1930 he published The New Preaching, lectures given at the College of Preachers in Washington. A life-long love of preaching and a conviction of the divine origin and permanent necessity of the office of the preacher moved him to give these lectures.

The head of the village school where he had his early training, knowing that Newton was thinking of entering the ministry, said something that made a profound and permanent impression on him: "If a preacher cannot remember his sermon long enough to preach it, nobody will remember it long after it is preached." Newton wished that it were impossible for a sermon to be read, so that the preacher might be set free to look his people in the eyes and talk of things he knows too well to forget.

His own sermons were never written until after they were preached. This gave him the benefit of the reactions of the congregation. What he received from them in mist, he tried to return in gentle rain. Newton tells us that half a dozen times in his life he wrote sermons and read them, but only once with real success.

Newton recognized the necessity for writing sermons even though they were not to be read in the pulpit. In an interview with Edgar De Witt Jones he said: "A young preacher ought to write his sermons for years, if only to learn the weight, worth, color and music of words, and acquire a moral sense in using them. For sixteen years I published a sermon every week, and often two, written after they were delivered, and it has helped me towards clarity, precision and concision, as well as in all sorts of ways."6

Every preacher, said Newton, has only one sermon to preach, the story of his heart, the truth made real in his life and vivid in his vision. Emerson, in an address to divinity students, complained that "the soul is not preached." If that be true, preaching is a failure. When the soul is preached men hear their own souls speak to them in the tones of the preacher, and as Augustine expressed it, "one loving spirit sets another on fire."